Friday, June 09, 2006

Unearthed

One of my coworkers recently published his first novel. This auspicious event has gotten me thinking about my own earliest experiences with writing. (If I may shill for a moment, I found The Stolen Child to be insightful and entertaining. It grapples with the notion of identity and presents some original takes on relationships.)When I was younger, I was a science devotee, a purest. I was entranced by physics and astronomy and loved their language, math. Having been raised by a biological database guru (before the term “bioinformatics” was common-parlance), with the cruel tutelage of an older brother who is an ascetic in the discipline of computer science, I learned that the sciences natural, hard, and applied, were the only avenues of learning.I was blindsided in high school by finding fiction inside and outside of the classroom that actually got me thinking. Tragedy of tragedies, I was even taken-in by all the useless beauty of a poem. I started writing in lieu of doing banal homework assignments. There was as much wisdom in this pursuit as folly.There would come a day that would change the universe, in which I realized the obvious course of combining writing with the love of science, but this is a story for another time. For now, I leave you with that first poem that as a very young person, caught my eye.

in Just-spring when the world is mud-luscious the littlelame balloonman

We write under the assumption that what we have to say is important to someone else. Otherwise, we would simply think and be content. This is the dusty window on my world, where I aim to influence and to be influenced through words.